A leading music educator in the United States has warned that while providing high levels of intensive training to a few, society is failing to educate the many to become prospective audiences for classical music.

In his recently published a book entitled, The Crisis of Classical Music in America, 78-year-old musicologist Robert Freeman addresses ways to combat the problems classical musicians face today such as the decline in public appetite for performances and the subsequent dwindling prospects of employment. He also takes aim at those who advocate intense specialisation in music education, arguing that all children naturally fall in love with music and by providing selective opportunities for children deemed “gifted”, the majority miss out.

In his preface Freeman, director of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester for 24 years and now a teacher at the University of Texas, writes “the crisis in classical music comes in important measure from the obsessively narrow way we have trained musicians for more than two centuries. Adding to the problem is our continuing production of increasing numbers of music degrees, now more than 21,000 American collegiate degrees a year, in a field where there have never been many jobs, but where there are...